Hypothesis: there are less comments per user on LW 2.0 than the old LW, because the user base is more educated as to where they have a valuable opinion vs where they don’t.
The question is fuzzier than it might seem at first. The issues is that population of commenters size changes too. You can have a world where the number of very frequent commenters has gone up but the average per commenter has gone done because the number of infrequent commenters has grown even faster than the number of frequent commenters.
There are also multiple possible causes for growth/decline, change in frequency, etc., that I don’t think you could really link them to a mechanism as specific as being more educated about where your opinion is valuable. Though I’d definitely link the number of comments per person to the number of other active commenters and number of conversations going, a network effects kind of thing.
Anyhow, some graphs:
Indeed, the average (both mean and median) comments per active commenter each week has gone down.
But it’s generally the case that the number of comments and commenters went way down, recovering only late 2017 at the time of Inadequate Equilibria and LessWrong 2.0
We can also look at the composition commenter commenting frequency. Here I’ve been the commenters for each week into a bin/bucket and seen how they’ve changed. Top graph is overall volume, bottom graph is the percentage of commenting population in each frequency bucket:
I admit that we must conclude that high-frequency commenters (4+ comments/week) have diminished in absolute numbers and as a percentage over time, though a slight upward trend in the last six months.
Are there any obvious tie-ins to the launch of the Alignment Forum? It seems plausible that the people who were here almost exclusively for the AI research posts might have migrated there.
Alternatively, if Alignment Forum is in fact counted, it might be that the upward trend reflects growth in that segment.
I’ll suggest the main change is open threads get fewer comments because the system makes open threads less conspicuous, and provides alternatives, such as questions, that are decent substitutes for comments.
Hypothesis: there are less comments per user on LW 2.0 than the old LW, because the user base is more educated as to where they have a valuable opinion vs where they don’t.
Ruby can probably get us the answer to whether the premise is true next week. Seems likely true, but I would only give it 75%.
The question is fuzzier than it might seem at first. The issues is that population of commenters size changes too. You can have a world where the number of very frequent commenters has gone up but the average per commenter has gone done because the number of infrequent commenters has grown even faster than the number of frequent commenters.
There are also multiple possible causes for growth/decline, change in frequency, etc., that I don’t think you could really link them to a mechanism as specific as being more educated about where your opinion is valuable. Though I’d definitely link the number of comments per person to the number of other active commenters and number of conversations going, a network effects kind of thing.
Anyhow, some graphs:
Indeed, the average (both mean and median) comments per active commenter each week has gone down.
We can also look at the composition commenter commenting frequency. Here I’ve been the commenters for each week into a bin/bucket and seen how they’ve changed. Top graph is overall volume, bottom graph is the percentage of commenting population in each frequency bucket:
I admit that we must conclude that high-frequency commenters (4+ comments/week) have diminished in absolute numbers and as a percentage over time, though a slight upward trend in the last six months.
Great work!
Are there any obvious tie-ins to the launch of the Alignment Forum? It seems plausible that the people who were here almost exclusively for the AI research posts might have migrated there.
Alternatively, if Alignment Forum is in fact counted, it might be that the upward trend reflects growth in that segment.
I’ll suggest the main change is open threads get fewer comments because the system makes open threads less conspicuous, and provides alternatives, such as questions, that are decent substitutes for comments.
I think the Hypothesis is not about Open Threads specifically
Upvoted for testability.